Bill Hand: Biking for health, despite multiple injuries

Published: Saturday, May 24, 2014 at 02:03 PM.

It’s that time of year again when I haul out my Trek bicycle, dust it off, and go trolling for crazy dogs and new ways to keep the emergency room staff entertained.

I do this partly for my health, which is odd considering how many joints, tendons and bicycle helmets I’ve destroyed. But it’s a good cardio workout. I’ve got a great heart, I imagine, but the rest of me has paid for it.

I rode those traditional ’60s and ’70s style bikes when I was a kid: you know, the ones with all those parts with manly names like “banana seats” and “butterfly handlebars.” I hitched one of those four-or-five foot fiberglass poles with a bright orange flag on it so people could see me coming up over a hill.

I rode safely in those days. I don’t think I started being dangerous on bikes until I grew up.

I got my first road bike shortly after the Great Ant and Chipped Ham Slaughter which, if you’ll remember, I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I spent part of a summer helping my father build a vacation house on a lake. Well, beside the lake. It was a deep lake and the moisture and fish would have caused a lot of damage had we tried to build on it.

He rewarded me with a bright red Schwinn, built in the days when Schwinn executives used to look at each other and say, “Hey, let’s build bikes!” Not later, when they said, “Hey, let’s build crap! It’ll be a lot less work and we’ll make a lot more money.”

I rode the daylights out of that thing. It still holds a special place in my heart. Which is incredibly healthy, remember, despite the rest of me.

It’s that time of year again when I haul out my Trek bicycle, dust it off, and go trolling for crazy dogs and new ways to keep the emergency room staff entertained.

I do this partly for my health, which is odd considering how many joints, tendons and bicycle helmets I’ve destroyed. But it’s a good cardio workout. I’ve got a great heart, I imagine, but the rest of me has paid for it.

I rode those traditional ’60s and ’70s style bikes when I was a kid: you know, the ones with all those parts with manly names like “banana seats” and “butterfly handlebars.” I hitched one of those four-or-five foot fiberglass poles with a bright orange flag on it so people could see me coming up over a hill.

I rode safely in those days. I don’t think I started being dangerous on bikes until I grew up.

I got my first road bike shortly after the Great Ant and Chipped Ham Slaughter which, if you’ll remember, I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I spent part of a summer helping my father build a vacation house on a lake. Well, beside the lake. It was a deep lake and the moisture and fish would have caused a lot of damage had we tried to build on it.

He rewarded me with a bright red Schwinn, built in the days when Schwinn executives used to look at each other and say, “Hey, let’s build bikes!” Not later, when they said, “Hey, let’s build crap! It’ll be a lot less work and we’ll make a lot more money.”

I rode the daylights out of that thing. It still holds a special place in my heart. Which is incredibly healthy, remember, despite the rest of me.

Now I’m on a Trek, which I got shortly before Specialized became The Only Bike That’s Cool around here.

My pal Benny told me not too long ago, by the way, that he’d gotten a Specialized.

“Yeah, the guy who sells them told me they’re the best in the world. All the great bicyclists ride them.”

After that sales pitch, in fact, Benny believed that the first Specialized came into being on a giant seashell rising out of a Yellowstone volcano.

This was odd because my Trek salesman told me the same thing about Treks.

And imagine the Walmart salesman would say the same about Schwinns, though I think Shimano, Japanese god of bicycles, would have reacted by derailing him dead.

Anyway, I’ve started riding in preparation for the September MS Bike Ride around New Bern. It’s a good cause. I didn’t used to think so, because I’ve never been that impressed one way or another with feminists … but then I realized the “MS” stood for something else.

Just today I did a 22-mile loop, stopping only twice to carry turtles across the road.

Last September I raised $1,000 and managed 92 miles before dehydration, doctors and a serious lack of Fig Newtons forced me to quit a few miles short of the finish line.

I’m wiser now, if a year older, and slightly more battered. I haven’t had my devastating annual crash yet (Two years ago, I undid my shoulder tendons in Grantsboro, and last year I knocked myself out when my back tire blew out on A Street in Bridgeton. I look forward to seeing what I can swing this year, but with a little luck come September I’ll still be alive.

I’m hoping that you, my readers, will be willing to sponsor me this year. Go ahead: Paramedics need the work. You can type in this ridiculously complicated web address that I suspect was created by a squirrel under the influence: